nowfound

Life & fun · October 1, 2015

HN

Hacker News clone for books

I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good…

Hacker News clone for books launched on October 1, 2015 with 10 votes, #2,052 of 4,175 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Alternatives

In plain words

This site is a book recommendation platform styled after Hacker News, designed to provide curated, current reading suggestions across subjects. It addresses the problem of outdated book lists on the web and the noise in Amazon reviews by creating a community space for quality discussions and recommendations. The platform uses a minimalist interface and relies on user submissions and comments to surface high-quality books that remain relevant over time.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314

    Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

  • TB
    Top books mentioned in comments on Hacker News2016 · hackernewsbooks.com · ▲463
  • IS
    I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation modelNov 2025 · book.sv · ▲606

    Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…

  • BM
    Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025Dec 2025 · hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app · ▲613
  • IM
    I made a Hacker News for podcasts2016 · podcastrank.co · ▲367
  • I made a modern web UI for Hacker News2022 · modernhn.com · ▲308

    Hey HN, I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design. I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I've taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN. I realize this won't be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I'm really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too! Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :) [1]…

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, October 2015

the whole month →